Problem

The vast majority of NH’s branches were forced to prolong operating hours on a regular basis. The culprit was performance issues with its financial accounting information system.[1]

The system could not effectively manage loading and processing large volumes of data feeds from its 20 application servers. Representative data feeds included tasks such as transaction processing, branch teller support and error management.

The underperformance wasted valuable resources in the form of needless overtime pay while sparking an uncontrollable deterioration of company morale and overall productivity.

Solution

In 2006, NH deployed Altibase for its in-memory feature to buttress its accounting processing system. Realizing that the root cause of its performance failures stemmed from the pervasive performance limitations of its traditional on-disk database, NH made the switch to Altibase. Altibase resolved NH’s requirement for high performance on large volume data, shortening office hours, increasing worker productivity and reducing spend.

Results

NH has reduced the operating hours of its 1,172 branches by an average of over 1 hour per day.

NH’s accounting processing system has increased the performance of loading and processing data feeds from its 20 application servers by 5 times.

NH’s accounting processing system seamlessly handles 3,000 TPS and over 50 million transactions per day.

NH provides customers with uninterrupted 24/7 service leveraging Altibase’s HA feature that comes out of the box and is deployed without issue.

NH no longer wastes capital on office overhead and overtime pay and has repositioned itself for higher productivity.

Technical Details – Accounting Processing System

NH achieved outstanding results with its accounting processing system by leveraging the key features of Altibase specifically in the areas of high performance and HA.

High Performance

With a conventional on-disk database in the back-end, NH’s accounting processing system could not effectively manage loading and processing large volumes of data feeds from 20 application servers which provided different categories of services. The legacy system only allowed data processing to be executed in daily batch mode. The throughput requirements of the application environment went far beyond the on-disk DBMS’s intrinsic capacity. As the number of concurrent sessions and the volume of data increased drastically, the performance and the stability of the on-disk DBMS suffered greatly.

Planned and unplanned system outages became the norm, negatively impacting NH’s business.

NH deployed Altibase for its in-memory feature to replace the old, underperforming on-disk database. After NH made the switch to Altibase, the system started processing data from the application servers in real time. The system handled more than 4,000 concurrent sessions with ease. The system’s throughput was also significantly improved, delivering a minimum of 10 million retrievals per system per day.

NH’s accounting processing system has increased the overall performance of loading and processing data feeds from its 20 application servers by 5 times.

HA

Using the out-of-the-box replication feature, NH deployed Altibase based on a 2-node, active-active HA architecture. In this architecture, both of Altibase nodes processed transactions concurrently with each node capable of taking over in the case of a failure of the other node, providing non-stop service with improved reliability and fault-tolerance.
This architecture ensured that NH’s mission critical data was never compromised by unplanned downtime due to a system crash, malfunction or planned downtime due to patches or upgrades to its DBMS.